Sir Howard Stringer is the Briton who chose to serve in Vietnam so he could stay in the United States, which suggests the 69-year-old is not the type to walk away from a challenge. Running Sony – the curious Simon Cowell-to-Spider-Man, Bravia-to-PlayStation entertainment complex – while spending family weekends in Oxfordshire (which is near neither Tokyo nor New York) was never going to be the easiest of businesses. Somehow, though, Stringer has muddled through – although at time he runs the company in a rather dissociative way, describing it as an operation which he presides over with curiosity rather than runs.

Nothing much is easy at Sony, though – and not just because the company is in trouble amid the PlayStation Network hacking row. This is a vast conglomerate with turnover this year expected to be £54bn, which, as Charles Arthur points out on the cover, runs on tiny sub-1% margins. Any profits it makes on film and maybe music are blown away whenever the electronics business runs into trouble. Sony insists on staying in tough businesses like television manufacturing (where any rival in distress just dumps product on the market and profit is destroyed), and fails to develop its media businesses in the way that Rupert Murdoch might.

Sony Pictures is the Hollywood studio that is not that big in television (compared with Disney, News Corp, which has Fox and Sky, or Viacom/Paramount/MTV). Buying the aged Millionaire franchise and loose talk of a bid for Shameless and Skins maker All3Media only underline the point. As a film-maker, Sony Pictures hangs in the middle to bottom of the Hollywood pack and apart from Spider-Man and, arguably, James Bond, lacks the Harry Potter-style franchises or the Pixar-type animations that bring in the families, the 3D premium and the big box-office revenue. The operation is hardly failing, but different owners would probably have been more aggressive.

Music is also hard work, and not just because of the well-documented defeat by Apple in the portable music end of the market thanks to Sony's repeated issuing of so-so product coupled with proprietary download formats. Sony may be a firm No 2 in the business of recorded music, although its uniquely closed corporate culture makes it hard to tell (perhaps it is in recovery after the long, difficult years of the BMG joint-venture); but this is an industry perpetually in crisis – worldwide revenues down 8.4% last year, lest anybody thought that was over.

The company may in effect employ Simon Cowell, although one suspects not very cheaply. But the result is that its business in the UK, for example, is highly dependent on the impresario. And Sony's complex bids (with third parties) for Warner Music suggest that this is a company that may be up for a tilt at EMI at a time when only a billionaire mate of Warner Music boss Edgar Bronfman would fancy their chances of making a financial success of recorded rock and rap.

Plenty of us own a PlayStation, but decisions taken years ago by former chief Ken Kutaragi, who left the company back in 2007, mean the PS3 console is probably still not profitable now, even though unit sales are at or near a peak at 15m a year. Yes, it was the device that got Blu-ray into everybody's home, and it's a handy gadget to stream the BBC iPlayer through, but the upmarket engineering effort left the company surprisingly vulnerable to the much-more-fun Nintendo Wii. And as the rise of casual games shows, for everyone who loves Call of Duty there is someone who prefers to play Angry Birds. On an iPhone.

Sony is hardly in crisis, even allowing for its short-term problems, but Stringer's Japanese-American hybrid is only rarely a market or style leader. It works, in its way, but does it work well?